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The environmental toll of wasted food in America

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Roberta Kwok at Journal Watch Online highlights a new PLoS study¹ describing the environmental cost of wasted food—almost 40% of our food supply.  Here’s a summary of the study:

Food waste contributes to excess consumption of freshwater and fossil fuels which, along with methane and CO₂ emissions from decomposing food, impacts global climate change. Here, we calculate the energy content of nationwide food waste from the difference between the US food supply and the food consumed by the population. The latter was estimated using a validated mathematical model of metabolism relating body weight to the amount of food eaten. We found that US per capita food waste has progressively increased by ~50% since 1974 reaching more than 1400 kcal per person per day or 150 trillion kcal per year. Food waste now accounts for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and ~300 million barrels of oil per year.

The implications are significant:

• The 1,400 kcal of food energy wasted by each American every day is almost enough energy to feed another person each day. That’s roughly 300,000,000 more people on the planet we could feed with our food waste alone.
• The oil used to make wasted food is about a 15-day supply for the U.S.
• Let’s also not forget the fertilizers and pesticides used to grow this food, some of which ends up contributing to nutrient pollution issues like eutrophication.
• And if this food waste ends up in the landfill, it contributes to methane production and climate warming.

¹ Hall, K. et al. (2009). The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact PLoS ONE 4(11).

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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Posted in: behavior, food and agriculture, sustainability | 1 Comment »

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